The New Weird: King Rat and Monster Island

I have to say that personally I am not much a fan of the new weird. The entire time of reading these I found it very hard to get into. Though I think that the reason I found it difficult to get into is the exact reason others find it so appealing. The thing that distracted me so much was the oddness of the world and it's laws. An example of one of the rules that were abandoned in the book King Rat was the fact that a human was the child of an actual rat and that the human could understand animals. Even weirder still was the fact that he character never made much of a deal about that fact, he just took it as a matter of fact. Now if this story were set in a magical land like Narnia this could possibly have made more sense but it wasn't, it took place in London. Because of this I continued to be drawn out of the story and sitting there trying to figure out what exactly was happening. I couldn't assume or expect anything. The world was so bizarre that I couldn't really place myself in the main characters shoes and immerse myself, it kept shoving me back to reality. The same goes for. Monster Island though it wasn't as violet of a jolt to reality as King Rat. In this book one of the characters is turned into a zombie and another is being tended to by mummies. Both characters found their situations average enough to not pause in awe or shock, even for a moment. Otherwise the idea of zombies and people fighting to not become one of the undead was a world with laws that made sense enough to not have me drawn out of the story.